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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#271

Post by primitivesuave »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #165
primitivesuave wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His note to Meta: https://archive.vn/t6zQp

Oh wow. What he’s describing really resonates with me. Working in software, I feel it’s almost dichotomous in its nature that people absolutely coast or absolutely give a damn. It can be so difficult to work on a coasting team. And otherwise, it’s torture to your soul not to give a damn around people who do (if you care, I guess). In his role I can see that being a genuine struggle, arguably worse than what I’ve enco…

It resonates the exact same way with me. I hope our industry can start having higher standards, or at least start respecting leadership with high standards. 5% GPU usage is abysmal and it does seem to be reflective of the engineering culture (from knowing other people at Meta).

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#272

Post by bombcar »

pengaru wrote: post #140

"He is a well known and regarded game designer, who moved to a new consulting role at Oculus in 2019" Err, WAT ? In the context of gamedev, game design is not what I'd say Carmack is known for. He's firmly in 'down in the weeds implementation detail and optimization' territory. How does one write anything about Carmack and get something so fundamentally wrong about who he is and what he's done professionally? Game de…

People take “game designer” to mean “anyone who worked on one of them thar computer game things”.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#273

Post by bombcar »

nomel wrote: post #97
torben-friis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still can’t see what I’d be supposed to do during a work vr “call”. A physical meeting already has everyone looking at a whiteboard or screen, which is already solved by screensharing. Even if you could fully recreate the experience of being in a physical room, what are you supposed to gain from that?

I don't know if you've tried co working in VR, or VR meetings, but "presence". Hearing a voice coming from a low resolution tile in a Webex is very different than having some resemblance of a human sitting at the same table, where they can look at you, smile, and you see them talking and hear their voice coming from them. I much prefer VR meetings to Webex. Webex feels like a glorified shared phone call. VR feels lik…

The dirty secret is some huge percentage of meetings are useless and so zoom is a godsend because you can “pretend to be paying attention” and actually getting work done.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#274

Post by HyperSane »

solardev wrote: post #221
dmix wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a classic middle management malaise where everyone gets paid so well they don’t want to stir the pot? The bureaucracy and protection of today’s money cows which only clouds them from seeing tomorrow’s cows that will rescue them from certain obscurity? The Clayton M Christensen solution to big companies ignoring obvious problems is to have isolated small teams “infrapreneurship” who aren’t under the pressures…

Is that how Google ended up with eight chat apps while Search gets worse and worse every year?

No post body was provided.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#276

Post by MikusR »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5

“During Meta's developer conference in October, Carmack hosted a solo hour-long talk about the company's Oculus or Quest headset. He admitted he had many things to be ‘grumpy’ about, like the company's rate of progress on technological advancements and the basic functionality of the headsets. He said it was frustrating to hear from people inside Meta who found the Quest 2 headsets so unreliable that they refused to u…

In that talk he was talking about Horizon specifically and not Quest 2.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#277

Post by howinteresting »

yawnxyz wrote: post #65
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This pattern—massive outlays followed by poor, possibly-rushed possibly-underpowered workmanship—sounds remarkably like corruption. I worked at a medium-sized company that went through a phase of hiring ex-FAANG people, thinking we'd improve our quality by implementing FAANG practices. It did the opposite: The ex-FAANG people were absolutely masterful at self-promotion, office politics, and collecting wins for them…

it's so wild to me that FAANG has these hiring walls set up — like crazy coding challenges — only for the best engineers to then do work equivalent to what you see at gov't or consulting jobs. Why do they make it so hard to work for them, just for their employees to play status games?

The coding challenges are basically IQ tests that have been laundered into something tangentially relevant to the job, since actual IQ tests for employment are on shaky legal ground in the US.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#278

Post by azinman2 »

csande17 wrote: post #267
harrisonjackson wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interpreted this as coerced positivity and forced happiness. Not organic actual emotion from feeling fulfilled and successful within their role.

Yes, the atmosphere at most big tech companies is this way. Everyone writes their emails with a plastered-on fake smile. The worst part is when people pretend that things are difficult. You can't just suggest that someone not waste time on an obviously bad idea; you must acknowledge that the team's development strategy is a complex, multifaceted governance problem, and many quarters of sync meetings will be necessary…

I wouldn’t say that’s universal or inevitable.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#279

Post by MikusR »

CursedUrn wrote: post #99
etchalon wrote: post #11

Based on that hour-long talk, I'd say Carmack just had a fundamentally different set of priorities. He seemed to be focused on latency and scale, where Meta seems to be pivoting to fidelity and graphics.

Meta definitely isn't focused on fidelity and graphics. Their mobile VR push degraded VR graphics significantly.

Carmack was the one who was pushing for mobile.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#280

Post by blululu »

Blue111 wrote: post #196
mathgladiator wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He isn't alone. A core problem is that FB culture is way too positive and happy, and hard criticism is received poorly. The politics to get anything done if your name isn't Mark is borderline impossible. I left a year ago, and I've become beyond happy.

> FB culture is way too positive and happy oh wow.. never thought they could be happy at FB

Never worked there, but from everything I have observed, the free lunches, full medical/dental/vision and high six figure salaries generally imbue people with a sense of well being. The nice offices and decent working hours also help. The trip is that Facebook also has some mission driven stuff about making the world a bit nicer that some people really buy into. It's a good mission too and a lot of people really do enjoy using their products so it's not all that crazy to thing for someone to associate with. Why would anyone feel bad about making the world a more connected and open place for ~$300/hr? Hence the oppressive optimism.
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